


a much graver matter than death

by nervouswieldycolors



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Adult Losers Club (IT), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood and Gore, Bugs & Insects, Emetophobia, F/M, Horror, Pennywise (IT) Exists
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:27:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26658919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nervouswieldycolors/pseuds/nervouswieldycolors
Summary: In which Stan has nightmares, and it gets worse.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak & Stanley Uris, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Patricia Blum Uris & Stanley Uris, Patricia Blum Uris/Stanley Uris, Pennywise & Stanley Uris, The Losers Club & Stanley Uris, The Losers Club (IT) - Relationship
Comments: 4
Kudos: 14





	1. the first memory

**Author's Note:**

> This is a horror fic! I hope we're all here for the same thing, but in case horror or any of the above things make you uneasy, I suggest you don't read this fic.
> 
> NOTE: The experiences I write about these chapters are not based on fact -- in fact, they come entirely from *my* own head. If you ever are in need of mental health crisis help, call the US National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 988, or text TALK to the Crisis Text Line at 741741.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tw for insect horror, mentions of death, the clown, emeto(?) in this chapter.

It was a Wednesday when Stanley Uris first had nightmares.

He never really had nightmares before now. Even in his childhood, from what he could remember. But the dreams he had, as a child, couldn’t really be remembered, if he even had them. His childhood, too, an amalgamation of fragments.

He could remember the faces of his friends. He could remember the way that the sky looked when he would bird watch until the sunset. He could remember the feeling of warmth when he was holding someone’s hand. But he couldn't remember names. He couldn't remember where he would bird watch or watch the sunset. He couldn’t remember whose hand he was holding.

But he could vividly remember the nightmares he had, ever since his 40th birthday, when he woke up in a full sweat at 3 am, yet still cold, still terrified.

They didn’t come nightly. But when they did, they were always different. But the feeling was always the same: the ominousness behind them chilled him to his bones and settled dread inside his chest.

He woke up on the sixth day of this dreamscape, remembering that he had dreamed of darkness. And it was the darkness that scared him. What it represented. And the whispers inside of the darkness, beckoning him to join them.

He called out, in the nightmare, yet no one answered. He recognized it was a dream, but was it really? The terror of it felt so real.

The next night, he dreamed he was decaying from the inside — the nightmare had switched from subliminally implying that he was dead to actively telling him that he was dying.

He went through the stages of decay in the next few nights, feeling like he was rotting from the inside, to seeing himself rot on the outside. Stan didn’t know why he didn’t wake up screaming, given that the dreams terrified him to his core. Maybe because they felt almost inevitable.

At first, Stan thought that maybe he just needed to lay off the sugar at night. Patty was always telling him to do so, when she’d cut out for him newspaper clippings of some Washington Post or Mayo Clinic article that warned of 'the alarming truth about how sugar ruins your sleep.’ She’d cut them out even if they were on the internet, modeling them after old newspaper clippings to create the semblance of traditionalism.

Patty was always right, it seemed to him, so why wouldn’t she be right here?

 _I should honestly tell her about these dreams_ , he thought when he woke up on the eleventh night, paralyzed by uncertainty of what was real and what wasn’t. 

But yet, he didn’t. Something was holding him back, some part of him that he (or someone) had locked away, hopefully never to be remembered.

The dreams continue, never ceasing, until he dreaded going to sleep at night, staying up purposefully so that he didn’t have to see the dark again. He busied himself with whatever he could find to keep his mind from straying towards thoughts of rest, from thoughts of corpses and decay.

One night – or more like morning, given that it was beyond midnight, Stan looked up dream meanings on Google. 

He didn’t typically do this. Then again, he didn’t typically dream. 

He went with the obvious in his first search. **Death dream meanings.**

Okay, none of these websites look remotely reputable. But Stan, ever curious, clicked on the first result.

**Dreams about death often indicate the symbolic ending of something, whether that's a phase, a job or a relationship. A dream about death can indicate attempts to resolve anxiety or anger directed toward the self.**

Huh. 

He read on: 

**People who have dreams about death tend to be those who are entering or exiting an uncertain phase or period in their life. It can be a potentially life-changing event that creates anxiety and fear of the unknown.** **  
**

Stan felt like he’s had anxiety, and a fear of the unknown, all of his life. At least since he was young.

But those parts of himself had been locked away, a long time ago. He’d buried inside of himself that which he couldn’t bear. 

Next, Stan googled: **Darkness dream meanings.**

Okay. Now he’s getting somewhere. Or was he?

His palms were starting to sweat. 

**If you are lost in darkness in your dream, it suggests that you must also be careful because there might be some problems in the future. Dreaming that you are lost in the dark suggests feelings of despair, depression and uncertainty.** **If you stay in the darkness in the dream, some danger may come your way.**

Stan felt his heart beating faster now. He wasn’t sure why, but he felt a hint of recognition with the words ‘some danger may come your way.’

Finally, he looked up: **Decay dream meanings.**

He clicked the first result.

**To dream of any type of decay or rotten items, especially of body parts, indicates that there is a natural association with how you live your life, how you were born, how you grew up and how you will die. It indicates that your end is near, Stanley boy. You just have to look for it. You just have to float.**

Stan heard a balloon pop, and stopped his reading. He felt heavy.

He looked up from where he was working, his eyes adjusting from the light of his laptop screen, attempting to separate the shadows cast by the sole light in the study. Alas, in his old age, he was seeing things.

He remembers, when he was young, attempting to discern shapes from clouds and shadows. He remembered his father, holding a shadow in his hand in the hallway. At least, he had been sure it was his father, because of his stance, his dress, and what it had seemed he had been holding in his hand – the shadow had been a Torah.

And Stan felt transported back to the imagination of his childhood. It was almost like his younger self was seeing things through his eyes, making judgements for him in the brief moment of control. In the shadows of the study, he could almost see the shadow of a man wearing a clown wig.

He remembered Exodus in the Torah, and how Moses returned to Egypt and failed to convince the Pharaoh to release the Israelites. God smote the Egyptians with ten terrible plagues after the Pharaoh remained unmoved.

He wondered if the clown — or at least, a shadow of a clown — had come to grant him ten terrible plagues. He wondered what he remains unmoved by.

As he thought through this altogether impossible notion, he felt tickling on his hands, where they rested on his laptop. He slapped one hand with another, but instead of skin meeting skin, skin meets a lump on his hand, and his hand connects it with a sickening crunch.

There were more of them now, spiders crawling out of his shirt sleeves and all over his hands. Stan tried to scream, to move his hands to get them off, but he was immobilized. He could only hold his hands out in front of him and watch the spiders crawl off his hands in multitudes and exit through the vent by his desk. 

And in the blink of an eye, Stan was able to move again, and his silent scream turned to actual sound. He quickly clamped his formerly spider covered hands over his mouth, stifling it once more. In a split second, he ran to the bathroom, attempting not to dry heave until he got to the sink. When he did, he grabbed at it, leaned on it, like it was the only thing tying him to reality. And it might just be.

After he successfully hacked at least 27 times, and was sure that he’s gotten all the spiders out of his clothes, he slid to the floor, leaning his head against the wall and closing his eyes. Several breaths, grounding himself, then he opens his eyes, checking to make sure that there were no spiders on his hands. Yet, it didn’t seem that they were even there. Like a half-remembered dream, but in reality, and Stan was sure of that.

“It isn’t empirically…

_…possible.”_

_He is in the park, sitting around his friends, attempting to figure out why the clown existed, and what it wanted. He is sitting on a bench, next to Beverly, Bill and Mike, while Richie, Ben and Eddie are seated on their bikes across from him._

_“OK, so, let me get this straight,” Eddie continues, after being interrupted by Stan’s disbelief. He straightens himself on his bike. “It comes out from wherever to eat kids for like, a year, and then what? It just goes into hibernation?”_

_“Maybe it's like, what do you call it... Cicadas,” Stan offers. “You know, the bugs that come out every seventeen years.”_

_“My grandfather thinks this town is cursed,” Mike says, and Stan looks at him in surprise. He sees Beverly and Bill, sitting on the other side of him, doing the same thing. “He says that all the bad things that happen in this town are because of one thing... an evil thing that feeds off the people of Derry.”_

_“But it could 't be one thing. We all saw something different.”_

_“Maybe. Or maybe It knows what scares us most, and that's what we see,” Mike says._

_“I_ _saw a Leper. He is like a walking infection,” Eddie shudders._

_“But you didn't. Because it isn't real. Not Eddie's Leper, or-“ Stan swallows, attempting to quell the rising panic. “-Or Bill seeing Georgie, or the woman I keep seeing.”_

_Richie smiles with amusement before saying, “She hot?”_

_Stan gives the bespectacled boy, whose smile had turned into a grin, a death stare._ **_“_ ** _No, Richie. She's not hot! Her face is all messed up.”_

 _Richie shrugs. “Probably still hot.” Stan elects to ignore that._

_“None of this makes any sense! They're all like bad dreams. It’s not empirically possible.”_

_They are all silent for a few moments. Stan could feel the summer etching onto his face. How he longs to feel that again. The childness of summertime._

_Then Mike says, “I don't think so. I know the difference between a bad dream and real life, okay?”_

Stan came to on the floor of his bathroom, gasping for air like he hasn’t tasted it for the longest time. Mike’s words echoed in his mind.

How could he have forgotten Mike? Mike was there, for everything – the good days, the bad, when he left Derry for NYU, for when they held hands in the summertime, pretending that nothing was wrong in the world.

To him, it wasn’t just a random occurrence, as were all of his other dreams, which often had impossible scenarios in them. No, he thought, this particular one was a memory. From where he had lived, so long ago.

The rush of new memories overwhelmed him, but they weren’t wholly new. They were just hidden.

What other life were his memories hiding?

He thought about the new memory, rolling it around in his mind. What was young Stan, and his friends’ younger selves, talking about? He couldn’t quite place it, like it was on the tip of his tongue but didn't reach his lips.


	2. the second memory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> tw: general clownery, hallucination, talk of mental illness

He sat with this for several weeks, with no more immediate hallucinations – which he had since determined the spider-related incident was.

Yet, except one. At least, he thought it was a hallucination. He couldn’t quite tell, it was especially subtle. Whatever his mind was making up, it was always subtle.

Whenever he was doing dishes in those next few weeks, doing laundry, doing a puzzle with his Patty, or even just reading a book out in the living room, he would see, out of the corner of his eye, something that looked like a bright red balloon.

It was more than that. A red balloon every so often wouldn’t appear out of the ordinary, especially because the Urises lived next to a family of five in Atlanta. But it seemed to him that the balloon was always the same red balloon.

So, the family always bought from the same seller. That he could organize within his codex of rational explanations. What he couldn’t reconcile with was the fact that every time he would look at this balloon head on, it would disappear. Like it was never there in the first place.

He tested the scenarios in his mind that made this occurrence rationally acceptable. He watched, out of the corner of his eye, this balloon float down to the grassy lawn, and then directly looked at it so that it would have no way to move up. Nope, that didn’t work.

G-d, he felt like he’s back in his childhood. All of the tools he’s tried are from when he was a kid. But maybe it was the fact that his childhood also had unexplained things that must have gotten explained eventually, that made him so confident in these experimental measures.

He tried squinting and holding the balloon in a single place, moving his gaze rapidly to try to catch it, and even taking a picture – but no such luck. When he looked at the picture, there was nothing but the arc of sunlight that always accompanied photos, this time echoing a smile.

Eventually, in one such instance, he asked Patty to look out the window and tell him if she saw anything. He didn’t want to worry her, but he thought if he had to find out he was crazy, he’d want Patty to break it to him.

“Hiya, babylove?” He started, looking up from what he was reading when she walked in.

Patty looked up from her phone, a bit of paint on her face. Stan could see the thick red paint smearing from her fingers onto the phone, but Patty, ever absentminded, didn’t seem to notice.

“Oh, hi Mister,” she said, summer etching onto her face, a smile catching Stan in its warm embrace. “Didn’t expect to see you here. What brings you around these parts?”

He returned her lopsided smile with his own, holding up the book he’s reading. He glanced at it and then looked back at her.

He recognized the certain irony in reading  _ The Strange High House in the Mist.  _ Stan was never one for horror stories.

But the cover. And the title. He was drawn to them -- he wasn’t sure why. He had buried a part of himself before, and maybe it was hidden deep inside him. 

The house. Just looking at it gave him goosebumps. It reminded him of...

"Stan? You okay?" He refocused on Patty, realizing he was staring at the back window. 

“Uh, yeah. Actually, do you mind coming here for a second? I just need your help with something.” Upon seeing her look, he added, “Not that. But maybe later.”

“I’ll help you with anything you like, especially that.” She sits down on the couch next to him, deliberately letting their thighs touch. He felt grounded by the gesture, by her breath, by her smile. But now came the hard part.

“Do you see anything out there on the lawn?” Stan waited with bated breath as Patty looked, because out of the corner of his eye, he could see it. The looming of it. The ominousness of it, the weight it held in its light body, the fear he felt in not wanting to confirm the worst. Watching, seemingly waiting.

Patty looked, peering over her round glasses that rested at the edge of her nose, for what seems like an eternity. She frowned, looking at Stan, then back outside, casting her eyes over the lawn in an arc that seems to resemble her smile.

“Nothing but the Hooded Warblers making a nest in the potted aloe plants,” she said, easy smile gone, replaced by that concerned frown. “Do you see something more?”

Stan didn’t respond. “But did you –” He swallows. “Did you really look, Patricia?” He modeled for her, as he would model for her in her paintings. “Out of the corner of your eye, like this.”

And Patty did as he showed her. She sat directly like he was, sliding her eyes over to her peripheral vision, and  _ really  _ looked. Then she shook her head.

“What did you see, Stan? I don’t see anything, I’m so sorry.”

“What?” Stan felt panic rise in his throat. “But it’s there, it’s right out of the corner of my eye…” He rises, rushing to the window, as if a clearer grasp of his surroundings would save him from his hallucinations.

Patty follows. “Hey, hey, Mr. Uris, look at me.” She grabs his chin, directing his gaze towards her. He felt himself instantly relax, but he still felt panic sitting on his chest.

“I’ve seen it about fifteen times now, at least once every day since… since…”

“Since you haven’t been sleeping?” She offered, but he recoiled at that. She frowns deeper. “Sorry, just suggesting.”

“No, no,” Stan said, shaking his head furiously out of her grip. “No, Patty, you… you have to believe me. These things that have been happening to me, the dreams, the hallucinations… they’re not possible. There’s a disconnect. But they’re happening, and I don’t know how or why.”

“Hey, hey, lovebird.” Patty said, pulling herself closer to Stan. “Slow down. I believe you. I’ve always believed you. I just am trying to help you navigate this.”

He listened to her breathing, timing his with it. A few minutes pass while he calms down enough that he didn’t feel like he had to run away from his monsters.

“I just feel like there’s something that has broken inside me, but I can’t figure out why it’s broken or how it got that way in the first place.”

“I’m so sorry, Stan,” Patty repeats, rubbing circles into his back. “But you don’t have to find out how to fix it alone.”

“But what if it couldn’t ever be fixed? What if this is who I am now?”

“Then we’ll face that together too.”

He breathed a sigh of relief, which seems to say, “ _ We’ll face it together, _ ” “ _ I’m scared of trying to live with this _ ,” and “ _ I love you _ ” all at once. She understood, and she believed him, his visions, that he was hurting inside. And she would go to war for him, because he was her everything, and she was too.

“But try to get some rest. Remember that the Kings’ are coming over next week, and you know how much of a bore they are so I’ll need someone to rescue me,” she said. “I can sit with you until you fall asleep, if it would make you feel better.”

“It might, but I don’t want to force you to do that,” he said, resting his head on top of her chin.

“Honey, you couldn’t force me to do anything,” she replies. “Even if you tried.”

So he lets her. He lets her lead him to bed, he lets her push him into bed while she gets into it, grabbing her crossword, and he lets her draw on his back. Eventually, fatigue broke through the static walls, and he let sleep through.

His dream was unlike any other that he had before then.

He wasn’t surrounded by darkness, but by a semblance of light, mixed with color. He couldn't exactly see it, but he felt the light, and the mess of it muddled in blues and yellows. 

He was walking through, it seems, a reflection pool of sorts. Water – no, not water, air – pooled around his ankles. He thought back to Avengers: Infinity War and the pool that Thanos walked through to get to Gamora. Did that make him Thanos in this scenario? Probably, but instead of walking towards something, he was walking aimlessly.

Until he wasn't. The scene changed, though he was still walking through air. He was walking through a town, the edge of a town, towards a tower of sorts. A water tower. Instead of feeling the foreboding sense that he often felt during these past few months, he felt a strange sense of calm.

The scene changed. He found himself walking over the edge of a cliff. But it didn’t bother his dream self. It struck him, then, how vivid this dream was. As if he was actually there, in the town of Derry, like he was living in this dream now. It was easy, falling. He did not remember standing on the edge, and then it happened before he even knew it.

There wasn’t that rush of adrenaline. There wasn’t the pain that would normally accompany a fall like this one. Falling, it struck him, was as easy as flying. And that’s what it felt like to him then. As easy as floating. 

It was quiet before the fall. Once Stan hit the water, he felt, saw, heard a flurry of activity. He felt the pressure in his ears, felt the water churning, and heard Patty screaming his name from a far-off place. He longs to reach out to her, to let her know that he was there. To let her know that he was being repaired.

But then it was quiet again. Until it wasn’t.

IT’S NOT TIME TO, something deep inside, a voice, said, saw, felt.

_ What do you mean? _ Stan thought.

IT’S NOT TIME TO REACH OUT, the voice repeated, in its weird way.

_ Yes, that answers everything, thank you _ , Stan said, thought, felt.

YOUR SARCASM WILL NOT PROTECT YOU FROM IT, STANLEY URIS.  __

_ It? _

It was then that Stan felt the air around him take a deep breath. It seemed to sigh, that was, even though that wasn’t empirically possible.

And Stan realized that he was not breathing.

This wasn’t something out of the ordinary – did he ever remember breathing in the first place in a dream? – but he couldn't help but notice. And the thought of  _ why  _ he noticed was what scared him. Everything about this was so confusing. He just wanted to go back home.   


DO NOT BE ALARMED. I AM JUST FIGMENT OF YOUR IMAGINATION.

_ Oh, ok, now I’m totally not alarmed. I’m just crazy. _

YOU ARE NOT. I MAY BE IN YOUR MIND, BUT I AM EVERYWHERE. I MADE YOUR UNIVERSE AND I AM THE UNIVERSE. YOUR HOME. YOUR FAMILY. YOU. IT MERELY WANTS TO TAKE FROM YOU.

This time, Stan attempted not to respond to whatever was talking to him with sarcasm. 

_ That only gives me more questions. What does what want to take from me? _

IT WANTS YOUR FEAR. TO FEAST UPON. YOU MUST STOP IT BEFORE IT TAKES IT ALL.

_ Why couldn't you stop it?  _ Stan questioned, and then heard a rumble, which almost sounded like a mix of laughter and exasperation. He felt himself getting hot behind the ears, if that even was a thing in the dream scape.

ALAS, YOUNG ONE, I AM TOO OLD FOR THAT.

This time, Stan could only respond with,  _ Oh. _

YOU MUST FIND ME. YOU MUST FIND YOUR FRIENDS. YOU MUST REMEMBER. BEFORE YOU CAN REACH OUT.

_ What the hell does that mean? _

And Stan was launched into darkness once again.

He woke up, warm, but not sweating, and cold, but not shivering. He felt Patty’s hand on his back, and slowly remembered who he was.

Stan didn’t have any unexplained things happen to him for three days after that. He didn’t have a dream where he was haunted by his own death for three days. He didn’t dream at all, for that matter. Furthermore, he didn’t see anything in three days. He figured that was the statute of limitations on his mind going sideways, if that even was a thing. Maybe whatever that thing was was the end of it, and the end of his turmoil for good.

A week passed.


	3. the third memory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> tw bodily fluids, heavy talk of mental illnesses, general clownery, as always

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Back at it again! Sorry for the delay, can't promise the next delay will be shorter. I'm writing these chapters as I go now, so you guys might have to wait a bit. But figured I wanted to get this one out as soon as I could after the everything that happened this week.

Stan was running down a dark hallway.

The hallway -- no, the sewer -- he was running down was a cacophony of smells and feelings, the main being panic. He felt bugs crawling all over him, and soot and dirt caking his skin.

He tried to breathe. And this time, when he couldn’t, he heard a strangled sound come out of his throat. Almost a scream, except he couldn’t scream, and he was alone.

There was a blinding white light that overwhelmed his senses. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t think. He--- 

And then Stan woke up, breathing in ragged gasps, sweat icing his entire body.

He tried not to wake Patty as he tiptoed to the bathroom. His heart was hammering so hard in his chest that he worried he’d wake her up anyway.

He found himself on the floor of the bathroom, as all roads led.

He pressed his forehead to the cool linoleum floor, attempting to catch his breath, to ground himself. He couldn’t get a single, still image, captured in time, out of his memory. It was there, suspended in the recesses of his mind. As if he had stared at it before. It was almost a yellowed photo, curling at the edges, stained with the sewer water that had polluted his dream.

He couldn’t get the image of a sailboat out of his mind. A sailboat suspended in sewer water - it had been what he had been following that dark hallway. He recognized that sailboat. From somewhere. Only, every time he tried to think about it, his head hurt. 

From his spot on the floor of his bathroom, there was a dripping. A leaky faucet. _Plink, plink._

He tried to reorient his thoughts to the skin that was tied to the floor, which felt as if it was his only connection, if shaky, to reality. His forehead was slick with sweat, but that was quickly drying, in the sort of way on his skin that sort of created a layer of dirt on him. He felt dirty. He felt wrong.

Normally, that would be enough cause for him to get up, to go take a shower and put on fresh pajamas, but he almost felt as if his forehead was stuck to the floor.

He wanted to collapse, catch fire, or run. But he didn’t have the strength to do anything.

_Plink, plink._

Stan wasn’t a superstitious man. He wasn’t even that religious, even though he could remember, however faintly, being bar mitzvahed. But he truly couldn’t find any rational explanation for what could be happening to him. He didn’t think there was any way this, any of this, his dreams, his visions, his memories, was empirically possible. At least, enough sleepless nights on google told him so -- outside of sudden onset of altered brain chemistry that might have been affected by stress.

But it all felt so real. The spiders, the balloon, the dreams. He’d never had dreams like that, not even when he was a kid.

When he was a kid.

_Plink, plink._

He’d never talked about his childhood with Patty. Why was that? Sure, Stan wasn’t exactly the most open book with people, but this was Patty and Patty was different. Everytime he could remember, when Patty asked him a question about his childhood, he remembered feeling a thick black cloud suddenly appear in his mind, and in his chest. Like the cloud was somehow blocking out his memory, making things from that time seem so far away that he couldn’t recall them, but at the same time almost threatening him if he did.

He flipped through his codex of explanations. It could be anxiety, as it was what they had settled on for why he seemed to fall into a panic attack every time that he recalled his younger years. That would also explain why everything from that time was cloudy -- anxiety was known to cause memory fragmentation. But that wouldn’t cause the hallucinations he had been having.

He ran through the endless possibilities it could be, each seeming more unlikely than the last. Schizophrenia? Early onset dementia? Psychic visions? Premonitions?

He thought now: maybe there wasn’t a written explanation for it, or a supernatural explanation. He’d heard plenty of tales of psychotic breaks, with no clinical basis for them. Of people experiencing _delusional thoughts and beliefs, auditory and visual hallucinations, and paranoia_ , all before lashing out at the ones they loved more than anything.

Was that happening to him?

He could feel his body go cold.

Life would be so much easier if he didn't fear things. But maybe it was fear that protected him.

_Plink._

He felt something drip onto his ear. It seemed to sizzle as it touched his skin. Lazily sliding down the crook of his ear, onto his temple, and was headed toward his nose. He reached up to wipe the drop away. It was warm.

Stan sat up, looking at the blood on his finger. He held his finger up, inspecting the scarlet droplet as it ambled down, until it was a smear snaking its way down his hand.

 _The blood had dried to maroon smears on the mirror and the wallpaper and the sink_.

The sink. The dripping.

Pulling himself to his feet, leaving a smear of blood on the floor, he found himself staring in the mirror.

 _He touches one of the smears of blood, then a second, then a long drip on the mirror_.

He touched the completely clear and meticulously cleaned surface of the mirror with his one clean hand. It left an oily handprint on the glass, and Stan realized he was still sweating. He stared back at a shadow of himself, with sweat pricked skin, sunken features, and bloodshot eyes.

 _What is happening to me?_ Stan thought, and his arms started to break out in bumps. He shivered.

As he thought this, he found himself repeating aloud, “This isn’t real. It’s all inside your head.”

_“Do you see it? Do any of you see it? Is it there?”_

_“Here. Here. Here.”_

_“Jeepers! It looks like somebody killed a pig in here.”_

The voices, the memories, they entered in and out of his mind as he clutched at his ears, attempting to block the sound of his mind out.

“It’s all inside your head,” he said aloud, to himself.

**“Or is it?”**

Stan whirled around, hearing the voice behind him. There was no one there, and he saw out of the corner of his eye that the bathroom door was closed behind him. He was alone, except for his demons.

He turned back to the sink, with his hands gripping the edges, hanging on for dear life.

**“Down here, Stanley boy.”**

He noticed, for the first time, that there was blood in the drain. It had been dripping from the faucet, and it did so now, with a subtle plinking sound. He wrinkled his nose a little at the sight of the red on the white, immaculate tile.

He moved to turn away from it and to grab a cleaning towel.

**“Stan, help us.”**

Coming from the drain, he heard what almost sounded like children’s voices, high pitched, almost sing-songy.

He peered down the drain, and didn’t see anything.

“Who’s here?” He said, with his voice soft but strained, barely above a whisper.

**“The dead ones, Stanley. We’re the dead ones. We sank, but now we float … and you’ll float too.”**

Stan felt something drip onto his head. He didn’t want to look up, knowing already what it was, but the way he shifted his head to look at the crack in the ceiling felt almost mechanical. He wasn’t in charge of his own body.

The crack was dotted with blood, which had gathered at the edges of the ceiling fissure. Several drops dripped onto his face.

A mass of blood then burst forth from the silver faucet, spraying over the floor and Stan’s bare feet. As he stumbled back, the ceiling fissure also started to ooze red, covering the rest of the sink and the walls with blood.

Soon, there was about three -– or was it four? He couldn’t tell and wasn’t dying to find out -- inches of blood covering the bathroom floor.

Stan could only helplessly watch as the room -- which was surprisingly airtight, for the circumstances -- filled up with blood.

Until it didn’t.

Stan blinked.

And the blood on the floor was gone. The blood coating his feet and ankles had disappeared. The blood painting the walls had vanished, leaving gleaming white tile in its wake. The room was, by any passerby’s evaluation, spotless.

 _You could see everything, whether you wanted to or not._

Stan went to get the mop and a sponge.

And when he returned, he saw that someone had almost dipped their finger in their own blood, writing on the mirror in jagged letters. The red was stark against the coldness and paleness and the whiteness of the room.

**SOMEDAY WE’LL ALL FLOAT**

Stan felt his nerves start to buzz, and he steeled himself.

He told himself that it was nothing that water couldn’t fix. If only it were that simple.

He turned on the silver faucet, letting his breath fall once more as just clear water streamed into the porcelain bowl, and wetted the sponge in the water. He raised the sponge to begin to wipe off the

_mirror and the basin and the wallpaper. The three boys all look at the blood coating Beverly’s bathroom._

_And a small voice, she asks, “Do you see it?” She seems to be struck by how she could hardly recognize it as her own. “Do any of you see it? Is it there?”_

_Ben steps forward, touching one of the smears of blood, then a second, then a long drip on the mirror. “Here. Here. Here.” His voice is flat and authoritative._

_Stan hears himself say, “Jeepers! It looks like somebody killed a pig in here.” He feels the blood drain out of his face, though he doesn’t see any on the floor._

_He turns to Eddie, who says, “It all came out of the drain?” Stan can see the slight boy grasp at his inhaler._

_“And your mom and dad never saw it,” Ben says, as Stan touches a splotch of blood that had dried on the basin lightly. “Jeepers-creepers.”_

_All humor about the previous scenes begin to fade._

_“I don’t know how I can ever come in here again,” Beverly said. “Not to wash up or brush my teeth…”_

_A thought crosses Stan’s mind, but before it could flit out of it, he grabs hold of it, not daring to let go._

_“Well, why don’t we clean the place up?” He asks, only then realizing that there had been several seconds of silence preceding it._

Stan wiped the last remaining blood off the mirror, staring at himself. In the span of a few minutes, he had become 27 years younger, and then given all that life back again.

Were these dreams? Or were they

_“Under the kitchen sink,” Beverly responds. “But my mom’ll wonder where they went if we use them.”_

_Stan thinks hard. He digs deep in his pockets, feeling the disks touch his fingertips. Clean, like the bathroom would be. Clean, because he can’t bare them not to be._

_His eyes never leave the blood spatter around the wash basin._

_“I’ve got fifty cents,” He says finally, not recognizing that his voice is quiet. “ We’ll clean up as good as we can, then take the rags down to the coin-op laundry back the way we came. Maybe we can’t get all of it off the wallpaper—it looks sorta, you know, on its last legs—but we could get the rest. We’ll wash them and dry them, and they’ll all be back under the sink before your folks get home.”_

_Eddie speaks up then. “My mother says you can’t get blood out of”_

“Memories.” His voice cut through the silence, like a knife cutting through the fog. He didn’t realize that he said the last part out loud. Stan turned back to the door, hoping he didn’t wake Patty.

He turned back to the mirror, and realized how tired he was.


	4. the fourth memory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tw for some mentions of drugs, mild clownery

It was a couple days later when Stan found himself in the sleep aid aisle of his local pharmacy. 

His dreams had come back, after the… incident in the bathroom. Consequently, his sleeplessness had come back — and with it, the night terrors. He had seen the hallway paintings seemingly come to life, scratching at the edges of their frames while he was paralyzed in terror. He’d heard a dog, or something larger, scratching at the front door, but a foreboding sense of dread told him not to let it in. And worst of all, every night, he’d seen glimpses of that fucking clown. 

Usually it was just a shadow, or he felt its stare. Sometimes, though, he saw parts of it. Or heard clown shoes squeaking.

So there he was, in the sleep aid aisle. Trying to find anything that would stop the dreams, or at least let him rest.

He glanced over the different bottles, packs, cases. Melatonin gummies, sleeping pills, CBD oil. 

He bought them all. Anything could possibly help, right?

Empirical material could combat imaginary demons, right? 

The pharmacist — some guy by the name of Paul, judging by his nameplate — didn’t look at him funny, like he expected. “Can’t sleep, huh?” Paul eventually said, after Stan paid. 

“No. I keep having nightmares,” Stan replied simply. 

“Ah,” Paul said. “For nightmares,” he paused, licking his lips in thought. Stan tried not pay too much attention. “I recommend the good stuff.” He pushed forward the bottle of CBD oil into Stan’s vision. “Five drops on your tongue, half hour before closing your eyes. Creates a floating feeling.”

Stan felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up on end. “Got it, thank you,” he said, trying not to let his voice betray his fear. 

“You’ll float too.” 

Stan looked up, for a half second glimpsing It in all its fear inducing awe.

“Did you say something?” He asked in a shaky voice. 

But it was only Paul. “Oh, I just said have a good day,” he said. “You ok, man?”

Stan closed his eyes for a brief moment. “Yes, yes, I’m fine,” he said after a second, reopening his eyes. “Thanks, and you too. You have a good day.”

With that, he gathered up his stuff, hurrying out of the pharmacy. 

That night, he elected not to take the CBD. Couldn’t risk… whatever it was. 

Still, with whatever sleep aid he did take, it came easy. His dreams weren’t easier.

Or were they dreams?

Stan found himself in the same hallway. No, the sewer. Why was he in a sewer? How did he get there? What—

“Hello?” He called, his echo bouncing off the damp walls, dripping with water, plink. “Is anyone there?”

There was a cacophony of smells and feelings, the main being panic.

His steps echoed, signaling an arrival he did not want to get to, yet against his better instincts he kept trudging down the sewer. The echoes were screaming at him to run, but something just kept pulling him down into the wet, and the cold, and the smell. 

Stan felt the panic rise in his throat. “Hello? Is anyone there?” He said, his voice strained with fear, at the same time wanting and not wanting someone to answer.

He could only walk further into the gaping maw of darkness and the unknown.

The sewer path opened up, slowly, then all at once. Stan looked at the room before him: the moat surrounding the round platform, the column jutting out of the platform, seemingly as a foundation. 

Standing in the platform with her back turned to him was a woman. 

She was shorter than he remembered, and paler too. She stood with an air of vulnerability, but he would know that air anywhere – it was the air of a lion pretending to be an antelope. Though she be little, she is fierce. And if there was any doubt in his mind of who she was, he would only have to look at that gorgeous fall of bright red-auburn hair, that all the guys that summer fell in love with. Maybe he fell in love with her too, but not like that.

“Bev?”

The word echoed throughout the cavern, breaking the silence like a knife. 

Beverly Marsh did not turn around. 

Stan stepped forward. 

She was standing and looking at a mirror, but he couldn’t see what she was looking at. 

His footsteps echoed louder now as he quickened his pace, attempting to get closer to her, to his friend, to his fellow Loser. But the quicker his pace was, the farther he felt he was away from her. 

She is lost now, Stanley boy. 

A new voice, like gravel, echoed through the chamber. 

“What?”

You couldn’t save her. You couldn’t save anyone. You were just a little boy, who was only interested in birds and was worthless to his friends. 

Stan swallowed, though his throat was dry. He could feel, despite the cold, sweat starting to stick his shirt to skin. 

“No,” he said. “No, you’re wrong. My friends needed me, as much as I needed them.”

To them, you were just another annoyance. 

“That’s not true, and you know it!” 

Do you?

He could feel his tongue, heavy in his mouth. He could hear his own breathing, strained and panicked and tight. Stan licked his dry lips. 

“Bev,” he said again, “you got to snap out of it, okay?” 

He wasn’t sure where this was coming from. 

“It’s not real. It’s just messing with you.”

Am I? Are you? 

Are you truly real, Stanley boy? Or are you just another memory? 

Stan could feel bile rise in his throat now. 

“Listen here, whoever you are! I may not be real, you may not be real, none of this may be real! But one thing I know for sure: I am not scared of you!”

The gravelly voice, the one that made fear rise in throat even though he tried to believe it wasn’t — the one that was nothing like the calming one — actually laughed at that. 

Are you sure? 

Stan could feel himself spiraling in a way that hadn’t happened since he was thirteen. 

Join us, Stanley. You don’t have a choice. 

Of course I do, he thought. Don’t I? 

Stan closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He wanted to collapse, catch fire, or run. But he did the only thing he could think to do — the opposite of every option he wanted. 

“Robins!” he screamed into the darkness, and for a moment the thing approaching, the voice, the fear, it hesitated. “Robins! Gray egrets! Loons! Scarlet tanagers! Grackles! Hammerhead woodpeckers! Redheaded woodpeckers! Chickadees! Wrens!”

The voice crumpled with a half hearted scream.

And the dream shattered. 

Or, more accurately, the mirror shattered.

Bev, back still turned, flinched against the shattering glass pane and fell backwards towards the stone floor. 

Stan was suddenly able to move again just as the dream was crumbling. Just as the chamber was crumbling. 

He was able to run over the moat before falling to his hands and knees. His hands scraped the grimy cement, and they were bleeding. 

But Stan didn’t care. He only needed to save Bev. He only needed to make sure his friend lived. 

“Bev!” he said, throat raw with the agony of fear, in the same shriek of the birds. 

This time, he saw the shock of red hair move. 

And he looked up to her gray green eyes boring into his. And he saw her lips move. 

“Stan?” She said, her voice wavering.

That was the last thing he saw, before rocks fell. 

Stan woke up, with tears on his face and goosebumps dotting his body.

He shivered, underneath the covers. 

Everything felt like a half-remembered dream, like he was moving through negative space. 

“What’s happening to me?” He asked aloud. Patty shifted next to him. 

He closed his eyes, sinking deeper into the mattress and into the dark. He tried to slow his breathing. Count sheep. Anything to stave off the thoughts that had trapped him.

The next morning was breezy, and sunny. Stan decided to call in sick for work. 

His boss took it well, figuring there must be a pretty good reason for it. Stan didn’t usually take sick days.

He waited until Patty left to teach before getting dressed. He chose his clothes carefully, deliberately, like the contents of his dresser were the only things tying him to reality. 

A few minutes later, he was out the door, fully dressed and decent.

He lingered in the driveway, seeing a boy bike by the Urises’ property on his way to school

Hi-yo Silver, away! 

and then he found himself in one of the many public squares by Centennial Olympic Park. 

A whip-poor-will called, as Stan considered turning back.

What he was going to do – where he was going to go - shouldn’t be in the realm of facts. 

But he had tried facts. He had tried logic. Whatever he was dealing with wasn’t empirically possible, so he had to deal with it in empirically possible ways. 

Stan found him standing in front of magic shop.

It wasn’t truly a magic shop. It was more like a metaphysical shop. Which, as he found when he googled the word, meant a branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time, and space. So, technically still a science?

He had discovered this shop while searching for explanations for his hallucinations online, a short while ago. It was one of dozens in the area, but he felt drawn to it, like some invisible force was pulling him to find answers there. 

So, Stan found himself standing, on a Tuesday morning, in front of The Turtle’s Menagerie. 

Hesitating on whether to go in. 

But deciding to anyways.

The bell chimed, a low, sonorous charm, as Stan pushed the door to enter the tiny store. As he shuffled in, he realized that it wasn’t like any store he’d seen before. Instead, it was filled from ceiling to floor with supplies, with clutter, with books and trinkets he could only assume were labelled magical. He felt an itch crawling down his spine and panic rise in his throat, nearly choking him with a compulsion to make some semblance of order out of the madness. He felt his fingertips go cold, and a familiar buzz take over his thoughts. 

Robins, gray egrets, loons, scarlet tanagers, grackles hammerhead woodpeckers, redheaded woodpeckers. Chickadees, wrens, nightjars. With every bird he chanted in his mind, he felt the anxiety slip away, the warmth come back to his fingers. He felt himself get back control. 

There was an old man, older than time (or so it seemed), sleeping at the counter. Stan made sure to move as quietly as possible about the shop — if you could even call it that. It seemed to him like it was more like a library. There were books and papers scattered throughout the small cupboard of a store.

It reminded him of something, that he had seen long ago. A library — Ben had loved the way it was always cool, its murmuring quiet (which he talked about with loud words only meant for Stan, who understood that quietness didn’t mean loneliness sometimes), the riffle of pages being turned in the Periodicals and the smell of the books. But this wasn’t like that library, with the shadowy charm of the library forgotten – or at least, gone for a while – versus the brightness and sunniness and clutter of this one. 

Stan picked up a book off of the many shelves, staring at it for a while. Emblazoned across The book of divination by Ann Fiery, and he remembered the castle on the hill and the January Embers. He felt an unfamiliar emotion rise in his throat.

The cover of the book looked peculiar, but this shop looked peculiar, so he didn’t think much of it. It looked almost like those Barnes and Noble collector’s edition covers, but the gold filgree was peeling off of the book, leaving a faint yellow outline painted into the leather. As he lifted the cover, it made a crunching sound, as if it had not been opened in a long while.

The books’ pages were yellowed, sturdy like cardstock, and blank.

Stan furrowed his brow, flipping through the pages with a thwip. Eventually, he flipped faster, as every page he saw came up blank. Thwip, thwip, thwip. 

After about 50 blank pages, he came across a word inked into the pages, so faintly he almost missed it. In fact, he did skip a couple pages before he had to go back. Written in capital scrawl, with what looked to be a ballpoint pen that was pressed into the pages so delicately that it did not bleed or emboss the other pages, was the word:

DRIVE

A couple pages later, he came across another word.

YOUR

A few more, with his heart beating faster now:

WAY

And finally, there was one final word. Or at least, any words after these were too faint for Stan to decipher.

OUT

With shaky fingers, Stan flipped through the rest of the pages before closing the cover. Somehow, he wasn’t surprised to see the cover had changed. He was now looking at the cover of a book he had never seen, but instantly recognized: it had a car with two teenagers in it, and stamped in gold lettering was the title, Hot Rod, by a man named Henry Gregor Felsen.

It’s really bloody, Ben tells him. It’s about a kid who was a really great driver, but there’s this party-pooper cop who was always trying to slow him down. Also, there’s no speed limits in Iowa — pretty cool, huh?

There was something poking into the edges of his vision. He looked up, to see a poster that wasn’t there before. The brand-new poster showed a happy mailman delivering a letter to a happy kid. LIBRARIES ARE FOR WRITING, TOO, the poster said. WHY NOT WRITE A FRIEND TODAY? THE SMILES ARE GUARANTEED!

The poster seemed to change before his eyes. 

ONE IDEA LIGHTS A THOUSAND CANDLES. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

For a moment, he felt like he was back in the library of his youth. The smell of old books accosted his senses, as the hubbub of children’s voices lulled him into a calm. The burning smoke-hazed twilight of a late-October afternoon streamed through the windows, the sun only a bitter orange light on the horizon.

“It’s right, you know.”

The voice behind him nearly made him drop the book he was holding, as he was transported back to the present and to the shop. 

“Did you say something?” Stan asked, turning around to face the old man.  
The old man smiled, and Stan looked down at his name tag. It was a deep blue, like the waters of the Quarry, and etched in yellowed, crackly lettering was the name MATURIN.

What an odd name, Stan thought. Must be a last name. 

“The poster,” Maturin said, in a deep, sonorous voice that seemed to fill Stan’s soul to the very edges. “It’s right. One idea can light a thousand candles.”

“Waldo Emerson was a very smart man.”

“It can turn ships. It can ignite fires,” Maturin said, pausing for (to what Stan surmised) dramatic effect. “It can grow to define a person.”

Stan swallowed. “Look, Mr. Maturin…”

“Just Maturin is fine,” the man said, smiling a scaly smile.

“Right,” Stan said.

“Do you ever feel like just an idea could topple you over? Could change your entire worldview?”

Stan found himself studying a very interesting corner of the book he held in his hands. “N-no, can’t say that I have.”

“I just need you to think, for a second,” Maturin said. 

“Look, sir, I’m just trying to figure out why I keep having these dreams, so if you’ll just ring me up…”

“What do you remember of your childhood?”

Stan stopped. “Why, there’s a lot of things I remember. I remember…. I remember…” He trailed off, lost in thought. What did he remember?

“Come on, Stanley, think. What do you remember about your friends?”

“Why, there was… six of them? No, no, seven of them, we all formed a little friend group one fall… no, summer,” Stan had completely forgotten about the book now. He looked up at Maturin in a panic. “Why can’t I remember? It’s like it’s, on the edges of my memory.”

Maturin paused for a moment, seeming like he was searching Stan’s face. “Don’t worry my boy,” he finally said, patting Stan’s arm. “You’re almost there. All you need is a little push.”

Stan swallowed, fighting back tears at the realization of his lost childhood. He furrowed his brow.

“Wait, how’d you know my –”

And Stan woke up, in a cold sweat, in his bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Back at it again! Sorry for the very long wait, I was otherwise indisposed.
> 
> Glad I could finally get a chapter out to you guys. I have the rest of the chapters planned out in my head, but who knows when they'll get done. Thanks for waiting, gang.
> 
> As always, please feel free to leave comments or kudos, as they are the only thing that sustain me through the harsh winter.


End file.
